The Resistance to Aesthetic Education

Abstract

MICHAEL W. CLUNE is Knight Professor of the Humanities at Case Western Reserve University. His most recent critical work is A Defense of Judgment (U of Chicago P, 2021). The tenth anniversary edition of his book White Out: The Secret Life of Heroin will appear in March 2023. Twenty-first-century aesthetic education is so pluralist in its choice of objects, and so diverse in its audiences and practitioners, that it can seem, as Nicholas Gaskill and Kate Stanley remark in their introduction, that it represents the profession’s shared commitment. While I admire their hopeful stance, this is at present far from the case. Resistance within and without the academy presents the major obstacle to realizing the diverse projects described by this stimulating set of essays. The struggle for aesthetic education defines perhaps the major intellectual gulf dividing contemporary literary studies, and this struggle animates each of the authors. The fact that they find it impossible to make the case for aesthetic education without identifying that which blocks it signals their awareness of conditions in the neoliberal university. Naming the forces aligned against this pedagogical model represents the surest way of evoking the political and educational values that it seeks to secure. For Kristen Case, the opposite of the aesthetic educator is the professor who knows. She rejects the figure of the teacher secure in political, moral, historical, or literary knowledge, for whom instruction involves the application of this knowledge to literature. Case writes that “as the years have passed,” “not knowing” has “become more and more central to my idea of what it is I am doing when I teach literature.” Unless professors cultivate the capacity to have their minds changed by the work, a capacity we might, after Keats, call “negative capability,” then their hopes for facilitating the transformation of their students will fail. Case describes this attitude toward knowledge as developing over the course of her career, introducing an apparent paradox. It might seem as if the attitude of openness, of not knowing, is the novice’s attitude, but in fact the reverse is true. Not knowing requires practice, discipline, and confidence.